Google Wave.

I’ve seen quite a hype building up around Google Wave lately, and as all curious technology-related people, decided to give it a go. I found a friend with an invitation, and convinced him to give it to me.
After about a week, I finally got my invite, signed up with my google account, and decided to have a poke around. A good thing I noticed is that it automatically pulls up my gmail contact list and sees who already has Wave. The bad news is that only 3 people had an account. And here is where the real problem starts.
I gradually found more and more friends that had a Wave account, and we decided to start using it to communicate. We found all the features to be very cool and quite fun, for the first day or so. Then it got boring. Why? Because there is a lack of purpose. This thing doesn’t integrate with email, so you’re starting on a complete new platform. And you can’t just ditch email, so you end up having to accounts to look at, not one. With that addressed you would still have trouble using it properly, because most of the time there is no real need to have all those features in communication. And if I want to attach something to an email, I can still attach it.
It’s technically a very good leap forward, but it needs a use case and a user base. Which for now it’s lacking. And even then, we don’t know if that is exactly going to work.

But I can see what you mean, if people don’t subscribe to it wholeheartedly… if there is no integration with the lagacy system (email) it is going to be difficult to port people to it. Also what seems odd about Google Wave (and exciting), is that it is a replacement for gtalk, AIM, facebook, twitter, and email. It isn’t meant to be something that is used along with them, it actually puts them out of business. However, I am excited for the prospect of being able to only use one system for all of my communication. I agree with you that it is still, most likely, a number of years out… but I agree with Google that it is the direction we are going.